ON RELIGION.

Historian Opens New Window On Views Of Holocaust

April 09, 1999|By Steve Kloehn.

Next Tuesday, on Yom Hashoah, Jews and many gentiles will stop to reflect on the Holocaust. By a consensus as broad as any in America, that remembrance is considered natural and necessary, an effort we must undertake if we are to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.

But in 1946, as the first death camp survivors arrived in the U.S., major Jewish organizations worried about a different kind of lesson. That year, and in 1947 and 1948, Jewish leaders rejected proposals for a Holocaust memorial in New York. They feared such a public display would become "a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defenselessness of the Jewish people."

Were they craven or simply misguided? Or is it possible, as University of Chicago historian Peter Novick suggests, that the 1946 consensus has as much merit as the 1999 consensus? Is current Holocaust remembrance driven by eternal truths of history or social and political needs of 1999?

That is the kind of question few people today would ask aloud and fewer still would publish. But in a book scheduled to be released in May--and likely to cause an uproar shortly thereafter--Novick painstakingly details a decade of research into the ways in which every American generation "frames the Holocaust, represents the Holocaust, in ways that suit its mood."

Novick is no Holocaust doubter. An American Jew of Russian descent, he lived through World War II and understands the monstrosities suffered by European Jewry. He dismisses those who deny them as "malicious or deluded fruitcakes."

Nor is Novick some lightweight provocateur. He has been a member of the history department at the University of Chicago for 33 years and is one of the founders of its Jewish Studies program. He produces roughly one book a decade, the last being a 650-page look at the meaning of objectivity and how American historians have pursued their craft over the century.

In a sense, his new book, "The Holocaust in American Life," is a natural follow-up. In it, he asks the questions of a historiographer: How do people record and understand history? How does that change over time? How did a particular group, American Jews, build its identity around a historical event, and how does the broader society react to that self-identification?

If those ideas sound eggheaded, Novick's writing is lucid and fearless. Consider his discussion of modern Holocaust museums, which now dot the American landscape, from the imposing structure on the mall in Washington, D.C., to institutions in such unlikely places as Scranton and El Paso:

"One of the things I find most striking about much of recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration is how `un-Jewish'--how Christian--it is. I am thinking of the ritual of reverently following the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums, which resembles nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa; the fetishized objects on display like so many fragments of the True Cross or shin bones of saints"

Novick sometimes seems to take pleasure in poking at people's dearest assumptions. Informally he asks whether there is any demonstrable value in Shakespeare beyond entertainment; he asks whether teaching the humanities is a waste of time. In 1995, he gave a lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington titled "So What Is All This Stuff For?"

But "The Holocaust in American Life" is deeply serious--for Novick as a Jew and a historian, and for society as a whole.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants make up a fraction of 1 percent of the American population. The killing happened in a different era, on a different continent. Yet the Holocaust permeates American consciousness, from images of Roberto Begnini dancing across the seat backs to claim his Oscars for "Life Is Beautiful," to Holocaust studies that have become a part of the required curriculum at schools.

That's not likely to change soon. As Novick points out, thousands of people now have full-time careers invested in Holocaust remembrance. The museums are there to stay, the organizations self-sustaining.

Understanding how that happened and why is crucial to Jews, who have found a unity in Holocaust remembrance that eludes them in questions of religion, intermarriage and the politics of Israel.

It is crucial to all people who find their faith tested by history and their history deemed sacred.

And it is crucial to a nation that faces evil with no more clarity than it did a half-century ago. Does saying "never again" about the Holocaust, or blaming Americans for failure to stop the killing then, compel us to act now in Kosovo? Does declaring the Holocaust to be unique in its horror diminish our response to modern horror?

The answer, according to Novick, could be yes to both, no to both, and much more: "Individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test."

That will be deeply offensive to some people. But it deserves reflection, because if history is to teach anything, its first lesson must be honesty.